My Dad....

My dad was in the hospital last week, for repercussions of his past (8 years ago? I lost track) surgery to take out his bladder. When I was in high school, my dad was diagnosed with bladder cancer, out of the blue as he was 45 at the time and hadn't smoked or done any of the other things that predispose you to this type of cancer.

Anyway, after an unsuccessful bout of chemo (they put tuberculosis into his bladder, to make it slough off the inner layer) the doctors turned to surgery. Dad's surgeon told us that Dad had the most cancer he's ever seen in the bladder, but thankfully it was fairly localized to that place. He now has a new bladder, made from a piece of his intestine flipped inside out (this is pretty slick now, but at first Dad would roll around on the floor in pain as the "bladder" was still trying to act as an intestine, peristalsis ensued).

As a family, we all feel very blessed that his surgery came out well and he is now relatively healthy. We continue to deal with repercussions of the surgery; anywhere they reconnected the bladder, intestine, and kidney is suseptible to scar tissue that blocks passage. It's not unusual for Dad to have tubes coming out of his back, draining his kidney. It's also not unusual for him to overdo things and end up with a hernia as the mesentery in the stomach has been removed and replaced with mesh (see below).

This time Dad went into the hospital with flu-like symptoms, the intestine was blocked where it had been re-attached and no food or fluids were getting absorbed. A NG tube (or whichever kind of tube can go both ways, I forget) was put in to try and pump the blockage through. It worked, but enter Dad and his Stubborn-ness.

On the second day, when he was told he could be released (yes, released, Dad thinks of it more as jail as he's been in the hospital so much), the nurse tried to take out the NG tube and got stuck, so Dad just reached up and yanked it the rest of the way out.....ouch. He then proceeded to take out his IV and go wait by the nurse's station while they frantically filled out the discharge paperwork.

I thought about all this and realized that, as Dad is 53, it's obviously stubborn behavior, typical of him. But on the other hand, as he gets older, this will probably be taken as dementia, or people will think he's senile. I guess my question is, where is the line drawn between the two? Is it a blurry border defined by society's views on the elderly?

The day after the "release" I called Mom to see how she was. She said she couldn't talk long because she had to "watch your father".

me: "watch him do what?"

mom: "well, he's supposed to be relaxing but so far he's planted the garden, moved the 200 pound tier from the fountain, and moved the two concrete plantars to the front porch" (Dad calls this the Martha Stuart Hernia Collection)

me: "wow. can't you get him to sit down?"

mom: "No. now he's decided he wants a sink in the garage, so he's cutting pipes and plumbing outside".

Ugh. My Dad is definitely living with my brother when he gets older.